If you head over to Instructables, you will find many how-to guides and step-by-step instructions on how you can make things. It’s kind of like recipes for everything. Today I came across another brilliant project from Noel Portugal from the My Web of Things blog. This time Noel builds a snow meter displaying the live snow fall for any ski resort right on your desk before heading out to the slopes.

As my snowboarding trip approaches, I find myself checking Utah Snowbird’s snowcam a few times a day, wishing for more snow to accumulate on my favorite ski resort.

Snowbird Snow Meter

Noel shows you how to create your own snow meter using the ioBridge IO-204 and the Servo Smart Board. He connects the Snowbird’s weather data to ioBridge using the Widget API that controls a servo motor position that corresponds to the snow accumulation. Here’s a video of the Snow Meter in action:

As a bonus project, Noel also shows you how to link the Snowbird weather feed to Twilio, so you can get personalized snow updates via the phone or SMS. Check out the complete “” on Instructables.com.

Steve (aka Polymythic) created a Motion Feedback MP3 Player that plays music tracks at varying volume depending on the level of activity the system detects. The concept is to encourage more activity by creating a feedback loop between the volume of music and the level of your activity.

Motion Feedback MP3 Player

Motion is detected with a Parallax PIR Sensor. When motion is detected, the output pin of the sensor goes high. That out is monitored by the ioBridge IO-204. With or without a network connection, the IO-204 sets the volume of a DIY MP3 Trigger board from SparkFun. The volume is controlled by sending serial strings to the MP3 Trigger. Steve took advantage of the new Onboard Rules that turn the IO-204 into a standalone controller. When the IO-204 is connected to the Internet, the IO-204 also data logs his activity by sending it to the ioBridge data logging service in the cloud.

A number of ioBridge users created some amazing ioBridge-based projects for this Halloween. We were impressed with the diversity and how they interacted with the IO-204. From using some new offline features of ioBridge to using social networks to poke fun at their Halloween prey.

We have a steam powered steampunk pumpkin that blows smoke out if it’s ears. We have a spider dropping on it’s victim and snapping a photo and posting to Twitter via TwitPic. We also have a motion sensing, talking skull that scares co-workers in the owner’s cubicle. Check them out!

Jason has released a new ioBridge project that monitors water usage for his whole house in real-time. The system uses a water meter, an IO-204, and ioBridge data logging services. His first system monitored power usage, sunlight, and temperature which included a live demo mash-up with Google Charts.

On one channel of the IO-204, the water meter is connected to the digital input. On a digital state change, the module sends that data to the ioBridge servers. Included with the free user account is the ability to log two data feeds from your module. In this case, the type of log is a Digital Input Counting Log. Evey count is the equivalent to one gallon of water used. The project is rather interesting and the next step in conservation. Knowing water usage and finding your high water use times will help curb use in the long run. Details on the water meter project can be found on Jason’s blog and Instructables.

Who knew when Steve aka “polymythic” posted his ioBridge project using iTurn to pour a real beer that it would get over 100k hits on YouTube and make it into print. Well, if you check out the April 2009 issue of Popular Science you will find Steve’s Serv O’Beer is the “Build of the Month” in the How 2.0 section of the magazine. There’s a photo of the latest version of the system with a sturdier frame made of Contrux and an ioBridge IO-204 to link the iPhone to a web application to drive a servo. You can read all about on Popular Science and learn how to build your own Servo O’Beer at Instructables.